Viewed from the bare concrete and tar of Lower Manhattan, the distant northwest of the '70s was a fabled land of giant trees and oversized lumberjacks. Legendary sequoias and redwoods soared hundreds of meters into the stratosphere. Oregon, Washington, Montana and other northwestern states were known mostly from schoolbooks. Kids who paid attention in history class learned that Jefferson in the early 1800s arranged the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon. (His title to the huge swathe of land from Louisiana to the Pacific Ocean northwest was disputed.) Sent off by Jefferson to check the goods, explorers Lewis and Clark and crew embarked on an adventure that lasted several years. Their encounters with hostile elements, death and what-have-you, are documented in hundreds of museums across the USA. The Lewis and Clark Expedition became a classic story of American resourcefulness and perseverance. Aside from the title, Body Building in the Great Northwest has nothing to do with bulking up the body or the wilds of the northwest. The body Acconci is building is his virtual body, struggling to make it real. Lost and bewildered in an Orpheus underworld of unspeakable truths, lies and fears, Acconci's efforts to regain his humanity is the stuff of myths. The work is set in a small, enclosed room. Viewers move about on a barren landscape of dirt and broken glass projected on the floor. A couple of slide players superimpose commonplace images on the landscaped floor. Some are of the public arena – clips from newspaper and architectural shots of buildings and bridges; others are snapshots of home things, like a cup, a pillow, and a souvenir stone. The ordinariness of the items is not reassuring. On the contrary, as in a horror movie, the humdrum shots of everyday life exaggerate the good fortune of normal existence and heighten viewer anxiety. The gods do not let virtue go untested, and the viewer-participant knows the devil will have her day. Acconci's struggle to leave the underworld and regain corporal authenticity takes place on a TV monitor set face up on the floor. His attempts to climb out of the tube are futile. “I'm coming up, I've come up out of myself, you wouldn't believe what I've seen down there.” He never makes it of course. He nearly gets his head out of the tube, but then falls back. His is the vision of a poet who faltered and cracked, and gluing back together the Humpty Dumpty pieces is the best he can hope for. Body Building in the Great Northwest was one of Acconci's last video projects. He was nearing the end of the audio-visual phase of his career. What began as straightforward but unsettling personal actions grew into arresting works of media art that enjoyed international renown. Despite a welcoming audience and exhibitors clamoring for more of the same, disillusionment set in. The many shifts from poetry to actions to video early in his career were not simply a matter of experimentation. His early career as media art provocateur seems in retrospect driven by an idealism searching for an appropriate place to come to rest. He wanted something substantial to base his to work on. Maybe architecture would do, and off he went into another medium. An early architecture project involved restructuring the building wall around Storefront for Art and Architecture, a not-for-profit New York exhibition space for alternative architecture. He cut out large odd-shaped sections of the building's walls and pivoted them on vertical shafts. When closed, the building appeared to have a normal wall, but with the wall sections swung open, the space extended onto the street making the exhibition accessible to everyone passing by. The design of course broke every building code in New York City. Now 65 years old, Acconci has endured long enough to have the likes of Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley and Matthew Barney name him as an influence. Unaffected by accolades, Acconci sticks to being an unassuming iconoclast. He and his architecture team are busy looking to design anything from a spoon to a city. “The goal of our work is to make a mix, a mix of possible routes, a mix of alternate routes, alternate channels.” The wording of his intentions may be unclear, but in practice they mean he is currently designing a clothing line and he has plans for the future.

Barbara London

Barbara London